Rings of Power: Tolkien's European Mythology Subverted!

In a world where every aspect of Tradition is under attack, we knew that eventually they would come for the Lord of the Rings. In fact, the entire fantasy genre, which was largely inspired by Lord of the Rings, has been the victim of a targeted subversion campaign by the woke brigade for years now. Lord of the Rings could not be left untouched.

Perhaps the process of subverting the fantasy genre really got underway with “Game of Thrones”. This was an easy first target. George R. R. Martin’s series, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, on which that show was based, already contained many subversive elements- chief among them is the author’s utter disdain for the transcendent heroic quest. “Game of Thrones” is a story essentially about nihilism, where good never triumphs, any potential heroes die meaningless deaths, and the world descends deeper and deeper into misery, chaos, and despair. A perfect choice for HBO, which used the show as an opportunity to add in even more gratuitous violence and sex to highlight the total degeneracy of what was already a demoralising story.

We now have “Wheel of Time”, which also seems like it will go down a similar road with the injection of woke ideology, strange racial casting choices, and excessive and unnecessary sexual themes, including LGBTQ themes that have nothing to do with the original plot line. What was a story of an archetypal hero’s journey is instead bogged down by the profane, drawing the characters ever more into the horizontal plane and away from the vertical plane.

“Lord of the Rings”, though, has never lent itself well to this because the stories are purely about the hero’s quest. They are not bogged down by the characters’ biographical details and banalities of their lives, by long analyses of their inner emotional turmoil, by their personality flaws, etc. The stories are about the quest, not the characters that fulfill it. We only ever see small glimpses of their personal lives and struggles outside of the quest, such as when we see Sam momentarily yearn for a pastoral life with Rosie or when see how Faramir struggles with his father’s rejection. But the story overall never hinges on these types of things.

In order to subvert Lord of the Rings, serious changes would have to be made and so we now have “Rings of Power”, which has the feeling of some kind of SJW fan fiction rather than a serious and respectable contribution to an epic fantasy series. To subvert Lord of the Rings, it has to first be brought out of the category of “mythology" and pulled down into the category of mere “story”.

What’s the difference? A story is something that only entertains. Perhaps it contains a few insights into human nature or some kernels of wisdom if the author is particularly clever. But it does not convey anything on the level of cosmic truth, which is what mythology does. Every myth is also a story on some level, but not all stories are myths. Mythology is deeply and profoundly TRUE and REAL and the plot line which contains the myth is merely a vehicle to deliver cosmic truths that don’t lend themselves well to dialectical analysis. The plot line is merely a tool to help our mortal minds grasp at, interpret, and understand things that are far beyond our comprehension, and so it is often the case that a myth is fantastical or even nonsensical. 

Obviously it is not literally true that, for example, there was once a person named Osiris who was chopped into 14 pieces and flung across Egypt, with all but his phallus being recovered. The myth doesn’t exist to make us boggle at the silliness of the story, but to invite us to ponder deeper truths. What does it mean that Osiris was chopped up at all? Why 14 pieces? Of all his body parts, why specifically was his phallus not recovered? And what does it mean that he afterward gained new life as the ruler of the underworld? What possible cosmic truth could these things indicate? A casual reading of the story for entertainment’s value will not lead one to uncover the answers to these questions.

Lord of the Rings is itself a mythology. It is not a world that exists in this physical reality. The characters are not real, historical figures. It, too, speaks to cosmic truths. What does it mean that Aragorn is the only one who can restore Gondor? What does it mean that Arwen gave up immortality for him? What do these things tell us about the sacred king and what does the sacred king tell us about God? What can we learn about the nature of the Dyad? What does Frodo symbolise that makes him the only one who can bear the ring to Mordor? What lessons are here for us to aid us on our own spiritual path? Lord of the Rings is a profoundly spiritual story and giving serious thought to these questions will certainly draw the reader into a philosophical journey.

So when the woke brigade starts screeching that Lord of the Rings isn’t real and the characters could be anyone and everyone, they miss the entire point of the mythology. Lord of the Rings is fundamentally a European mythology and contains deep symbolic elements that are particularly meaningful in the context of European spirituality. This is not to say that other people could not also find meaning in them, but they do need to be preserved intact regardless. When you start twisting the story of the myth to make it fall in line with the globalist vision of a multi-racial utopia, you begin to obscure the truth. Little by little, the twisting of the story to suit modern agendas causes the deeper truths to fade from view, until the myth is no longer a myth, but merely something banal meant to entertain or propagandise, rather than to inspire or instruct.

Thus, when the woke brigade attacks our mythologies, they are attacking one of our most important access points for apprehending divine wisdom. Their attempt to pervert that which is a vehicle for Order, Dharma, Logos- and turn it into a gateway for Chaos- is a direct spiritual attack, not just on European people, but on the whole world. It is an attempt to extinguish the beacons of Gondor, to prevent any divine light from shining through in this world. 

So now that we understand exactly what is at stake here, let’s consider the casting choices and the “artistic license” they have taken with the story in this light.

Right now, the woke brigade is celebrating the “inclusive” casting choices of Rings of Power. And they fall back on the line that Lord of the Rings isn’t real and so it is possible that the characters could be this race or that race. Well, no, it isn’t real in the sense of an empirical historical fact, but even that has never stopped them before from making inappropriate racial casting choices, such as the black Anne Boleyn. We could also argue that it doesn’t make logical sense, biographically or geographically, for any long-ago fantasy world to be multi-racial, as such societies never arise organically and are only a forced and artificial creation of globalist dystopianism.

The only fantasy show I can think of where multi-racial casting made sense to the story is “See”, which is set in the future in America where everyone has gone blind. It doesn’t require one to suspend disbelief to think that in a world where everyone is blind, descended from a nation that was itself the victim of the multi-racial experiment, that you would have multi-racial societies in that kind of a future and people literally would not know or care what race someone was. 

But in a fantasy series which is clearly based in European history, it’s extremely out of place. That in itself rubs people the wrong way because it stretches the boundaries of what is believable and reasonable within the context of that world. It requires too much mental energy to maintain that level of cognitive dissonance and it pulls the viewer out of the story. Why and how this world became multi-racial is never explained and the producers are operating from the self-righteous belief that they don’t need to explain it, shouldn’t have to justify it, that you as the audience should just simply not notice race and be completely colour-blind, ignoring the fact that genetics is real. You can ask an audience to believe unbelievable things only inasmuch as it makes sense within the world that is created. Audiences generally find it off-putting when they are asked to suspend disbelief about something so out of place that it detracts from the story, such as in films that rely on Deus ex Machina events, when the whole story turns out to have all just been a dream, or when a character suddenly manifests a power that has never been shown to exist in that world. We are simply told not to ask questions about how all these races came to be mixed together in the Second Age in which Rings of Power is set, in a world where all the different races and tribes seem to inherently distrust and dislike one another, but by the Third Age in which Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings is set, suddenly there are isolated and homogenous societies again and no explanation is offered as to how these other races disappeared. But again, we are not supposed to notice this in the same way that we are not supposed to notice when Denzel Washington was oddly cast as the Scottish king, Macbeth, living in a Scottish castle in Scotland! 

So what is the significance of overtly racial casting? There are two main lines of thought that immediately grab me.

The first is that it is really telling that these people often cheer for the orcs. It was originally from the SJW Tumblr crowd that we started hearing calls for equality for orcs- these creatures that represent death and destruction and are described as creatures of pure evil. What sane person would want to give equality to the forces of Chaos? Only a person whose vision for the future is one in which evil triumphs. It is little wonder that this same crowd is extremely enamoured of “Game of Thrones”! No matter what touchy-feely words they dress it up in (like “inclusivity” and “equality”), they cannot hide the evil stench behind it.

Consider also that these are the people who claim that orcs are secretly meant to represent blacks. This was entirely their own racist idea, based on nothing but the products of their own mental gymnastics as they constantly look to manufacture racism where there is none in order to justify their hysterics. So in their minds, they have cast blacks as the forces of Chaos. We could psychoanalyse why they connected black people to orcs with no provocation to do so and what that says about their own internal bigotry, but let’s just for now simply take it at face value that they equated blacks to orcs which represent the forces of Chaos. What does it say, then, when they want to cast blacks in certain roles? It says that they want to undermine what a particular role represents by placing an “orc” in that role. They desire Chaos and want to give Chaos power. And in their minds, this is achieved by placing orcs strategically around Middle Earth. May as well just throw open the gates of Gondor while they are at it.

Critical Race Theory looks for white racism in everything, and so they see in orcs the depiction of savage, animalistic, “others”, and therefore imagine that this represents blacks in the mind of a white man like Tolkien. Therefore, the Amazon series becomes a tool by which to counteract Tolkien’s racism, even if it only exists in their own imagination and even if he was totally innocent of the accusation. But as we have heard them rationalise, all white people are inherently racist at all times, even unintentionally, even when they are creating fantasy worlds that call for absolute expressions of good and evil as the backdrop for a hero’s journey.

The second significant thing, which is far less sinister than the first, is that it merely shows their spiritual vacuousness. This obsession with tokenistic “representation” is something that only a person with no spiritual dimension would focus on. Instead, they focus only on the material aspects of the body or the ego personality, because that is all they are themselves. They lack the imagination and empathy to identify with those who are different from themselves. They cannot find identification in the transcendent component of the hero’s journey- a journey in which the hero’s biographical details cease to matter at all. So they grasp at trivialities like race of the body and personal circumstances.

I understand there is a character in Rings of Power who is a single mother- a detail that would be wholly unimportant in the broader sense of the mythical quest. There is a reason we don’t know much about Frodo’s life. We don’t know how he felt about his family, what his hopes and dreams were, who he had romantic dalliances with, because none of that matters any longer when one takes up a spiritual quest. Once you set foot upon such a quest, all the material details of your earthly life become irrelevant. It’s similar to how Julius Evola believed that his biographical details didn’t matter and so he only ever spoke about his ideas.

Thus, a spiritual person, even one who is only vaguely aware of their own latent spirituality, can always identify with the characters in a heroic story, no matter how different their lives are, because the commonality they share with the character lies in something BEYOND this life. One does not need to be a hobbit or even a man to relate to Frodo and feel the same heaviness of burden, the same sense of urgency, the fluctuations of despair and hope. One does not need to be an elf or a woman to relate to Arwen’s devotional love, her pain of sacrifice, or her quiet stoicism. 

But for those who are spiritually empty, they cannot identify with any character, except where their biographical details match their own. Their only religious devotion is to the cult of their own narcissism and they only desire to see some version of their hollow selves reflected at the centre of every story. The increasing demands for this shallow “representation” in film and fiction reflect an increasingly soulless population.

So on the one hand, we have a desire for representation because it increases accessibility for the unspiritual, narcissistic, and easily bored masses, but there is also the deeper and more malevolent impulse of wanting to replace “whiteness”, “goodness”, and “divinity” with that which is dark, destructive, and chaotic. It is for the same reason that they so often include superfluous sex, violence, and other profane and low-vibe elements into the story. Because that is all they can relate to, it is all that interests them, but also because they want to destroy that which is “higher” and more noble.

None of this is intended to stereotype or disparage any race, but merely to point out this semi-conscious or sub-conscious urge among the woke brigade to want to darken that which should be light and we can consider this from a symbolic and archetypal perspective. We are not referring to white people, per se, but rather the colour white, which reflects all light and bounces it back to the viewer, and is emblematic of light and life. And we are not referring to black people, but to the colour black, which absorbs all light and is emblematic of the plunge into both literal and spiritual darkness, where Chaos reigns supreme. This symbolism is universal and has nothing to do with race, even if you could make the argument that to some degree, the Hermetic principle of correspondence, “as above, so below”, applies in some way. The interplay between light and dark, good and evil, order and chaos is a metaphysical reality, which is conveyed through symbols as simple as colour.  Mordor means “black land” in the Elvish language, Sindarin, and the Black Numenoreans were so named because of their allegiance to Sauron’s evil, not because of their skin colour. Attempting to equate metaphysical principles with some kind of latent racism simply doesn’t stand up to any serious scrutiny.

Furthermore, the woke brigade rejects every principle of Tradition and Middle Earth is very much intended to reflect the World of Tradition. So instead of hierarchies, sacred kings, and a clear delineation between good and evil, they want a demonic and downward levelling where villains are humanised as treated no differently than heroes. And in that kind of world, there can be no transcendent quest, there can be no heroes. There can be only sex and violence because there is nothing else to live for in such a world. 

And so they will snuff out all higher principles in Middle Earth and turn it into another Westeros, because such a degenerate and nihilistic society is the only place where they could ever thrive. They are the orcs and that is why they identify with the orcs. They are the darkness and that is why they want darkness to represent them. It is why they cannot find any identification in characters who are truly good, noble, and virtuous and why they must destroy that aspect of the characters at all costs, reducing them to something which they would call “more human”, but which is in truth “more beast”. For a human is only a human so long as he strives towards godliness in his own life and turns towards his divine nature.

And when we turn towards the divinity in ourselves, we see it reflected back to us in others who share the same spiritual quest, regardless of their race or background, because at that point, we are more than just the atoms that temporarily make up our material bodies. 

But when we turn away from divinity, we are repulsed by it in others, and we seek further and further identification with the merely material aspects of our physical existence. Those who feel they need representation based on their race or sexual identity are those who have fallen very far from the transcendent. Those who feel they need to have their own personal story repetitively acted out in every film are those who cannot see beyond their own vanity and cannot comprehend of anything grander than themselves. They need tokenism in Middle Earth because they simultaneously need their own existence validated and because they have an urge to destroy that which is higher than they are, because they are consumed like so many modern people by their nihilism, which can only be validated in a world where Tradition has fallen.

For this is the truest meaning of the term “materialism” - the domination of one’s entire existence by the materiality of their biological form, their sexuality, and physical bodies. Through materialism, even the qualities of race become reduced to the most superficial aspects - the colour of the skin, the facial features, and the purely biological.

Lord of the Rings exists outside of the modern paradigm. Although it makes no claim of historical reality, it is as classical a story as The Iliad or the Odyssey. It is in many ways a book and movie that could not be made today. And although it will likely go down in the history of film as the greatest fantasy story ever told, the modern forces of progressive wokeness cannot have it stand unassailed. They cannot undo it, but like the Star Wars saga they can certainly attempt to trash its memory, desecrate its mythology, and attack its transcendent meaning. In the words of Tolkien, “evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made.”

But if there is one solace to take away from The Rings of Power, it is this: despite the flailing anger of the woke brigade, who embody the spirit of the elements of chaos in the service of evil, the original books and films will forever stand as a memory of what once was, an expression of idealistic and eternal form, unfettered genius, poetic splendour and classical beauty. A legion of imposters cannot tarnish Tolkien’s original creation. In his own words, “all that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”

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